An anonymous salary survey has been traditionally conducted annually since 2015 among European IT specialists in Germany. Below, you will find an in-depth comparative analysis of the aggregated anonymised responses from voluntary participants.
Purpose: to learn a competitive value of a skillset for IT specialists depending on years of experience, position, level, etc.
Audience: most respondents are expats living in Germany and working either for Germany or abroad (remote).
As always thanks to everyone participating!
767 Germany-based participants filled out the questionnaire in December 2022. The line chart below shows the evolution of the base salary (without bonuses and stocks) median from year to year since 2015.
| City | Count | Median | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Berlin | 485 | 82000.00 |
| 11 | Munich | 144 | 82500.00 |
| 9 | Hamburg | 27 | 75000.00 |
| 14 | Stuttgart | 21 | 72000.00 |
| 8 | Frankfurt | 16 | 72000.00 |
| 10 | Karlsruhe | 10 | 76000.00 |
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Top large cities have seen a significant increase in the median base salary compared to the last two years:
| year/city | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin | 70k | 78k | 82k |
| Munich | 72k | 78k | 82,5k |
| Hamburg | 64k | 70k | 75k |
Thirty days of vacation is a standard.
746 Full-time employees. Software engineers at different levels from junior to principal are paid 80k base by median (last year 76k) and 84.5k TC by median.
Here is an age/TC curve for engineers. The main salary growth occurs in the first 10 years of a career and then usually bumps into the ceiling of the market.
The median of base salary of all tech positions is 80k (75k last year), with bonuses and stocks - 86k (80k last year).
Starting from a senior level employees are usually eligible for stock grants as a part of a total compensation (TC):
Shares of respondents by technologies
| technology | count | mean salary w/o bonus (k) | percentage | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | Python | 185 | 82990.44 | 24.2% |
| 6 | Java | 114 | 83400.45 | 14.9% |
| 7 | JavaScript / Typescript | 103 | 84946.53 | 13.4% |
| 10 | Other | 77 | 84931.58 | 10.1% |
| 2 | C# / .NET | 38 | 81423.68 | 5.0% |
This year Python was mentioned significantly more often than Java, whereas they were equal throughout previous years.
| index | count | percentage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 | Docker | 324 | 33.00 |
| 4 | SQL | 257 | 26.00 |
| 8 | AWS | 237 | 24.00 |
| 5 | Kubernetes | 196 | 20.00 |
| 10 | Python | 185 | 19.00 |
Docker, AWS, and SQL keep leading year over year. Kubernetes, Tarraform and Clouds (GCP, Asure) are noteworthy.
The box plots represent the base salary distributions of each technology.
Example: Python engineers' median annual base salary is 80k (72k last year), while its distribution varies considerably from 45k to 140k.
Base salary median increased from 75k -> 80k, TC median - from 80k to 85k.
A change in a base salary distribution for this year:
Karlsruhe became more popular than Cologne among respondents in 2022. Overall the distributions in big cities are similar.
| Count | percentage | |
|---|---|---|
| Company size | ||
| 1000+ | 116 | 33.33 |
| 101-1000 | 69 | 27.94 |
| 11-50 | 14 | 20.59 |
| 51-100 | 20 | 25.32 |
| up to 10 | 1 | 4.00 |
No surprise that most of the layoffs in 2022 took place in big companies (headcount 1000+) - 33% according to responces. 8% of respondents were laid off: half of them with a satisfactory and half with unsatisfactory severance package.
No 91.20 Yes, I am NOT satisfied with a severance package 5.09 Yes, I am satisfied with a severance package 3.24 Name: layoff affects you, dtype: float64
No 61.15 100 - 500 15.91 over 1000 euros 8.21 500 - 1000 6.52 up to 100 euro 5.48 Name: Work From Home allowance, dtype: float64
30% of respondents got a work from home allowance from their employer. Usually, it was between 100 and 500 euros.
If you liked this survey and results help you - buy me a coffe.
Author: Ksenia Legostay